Farmers Market Visits Philadelphia Project

May 26, 1994|N.Y. Times News Service

Thanks to a novel farmers market, some residents of a housing project in southwest Philadelphia say they recently tasted fresh asparagus and cauliflower for the first time. Some of their children ate their first carrots and celery.

The markets here at Tasker Homes and at another housing project have been so successful that eight more farmer's markets are to be opened in other neighborhoods this year.

Sandy Sherman, a nutrition educator who helps coordinate the market, says these discoveries are telling.

"I don't need to take a survey to know that their diet is way below the recommended amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables," she said the other day as a swarm of excited children gathered to learn how to make toy wagons from sliced carrots, celery and peanut butter.

"I've found I don't have to teach anybody to eat good, healthy food," said Sherman, a former executive director of the National Child Nutrition Project, a Philadelphia-based education organization. "All I have to do is sell very fresh food at a good price, and people buy it and eat it.

"A lot of children are coming over with their pennies to buy fruit instead of candy, which is quite shocking."

The Merchants Association at the Reading Terminal, downtown Philadelphia's century-old indoor food market, came up with the idea. They raised $50,000 and put the plan into effect last fall.

"There is a whole ring of poor neighborhoods around center city that have no access to fresh food," said R. Duane Perry, executive director of the 75-member trade group and its new nonprofit organization, the Reading Terminal Farmers' Market Trust.

"I'm not suggesting that we can solve the problem, but we think we can make a dent in it," Perry said. "We might be able to recreate the network of public farmers' markets that used to serve these neighborhoods before the supermarkets came and went."

He hopes the markets will eventually become six-day-a-week operations, owned and operated by the community.

Nationally, supermarket chains have been abandoning inner city neighborhoods since the 1960s and the trend accelerated in the 1980s, when the industry consolidated and shrank further away from neighborhoods blighted by crime and poverty.

Densely populated public housing projects are usually in these poor neighborhoods, and their residents suffer, said Jeffrey Lines, a former public housing official in Boston who is now a national consultant.

"When you have a distressed urban community and distressed public housing, you see abandonment by all kinds of institutions and basic services, from hospitals to grocery stores," Lines said. "It's widespread."

More than 2,500 people, nearly all black and the vast majority on public assistance, live in the 736 apartments at Tasker Homes.

It is a shabby development of two-story brick bungalows, separated by patches of asphalt, that was built 53 years ago near a noisy expressway and a smelly oil refinery.

The neighborhood at 32nd and Tasker Streets, remembered by some residents as a thriving, integrated area years ago, now has only a Chinese restaurant, a convenience food store and boarded-up storefronts. The nearest supermarket is eight blocks away, but residents complain about high prices and poor quality.

"I used to go to the Italian market in South Philadelphia, but it's about 20 blocks away and it's hard for large families to take all the kids and carry all the bags," said Vernell Teagle, a resident of Tasker Homes who is the market's assistant manager.

On market day, Sherman rents or borrows a truck and then buys produce at wholesale prices from merchants at Reading Terminal.

At Tasker, she and Teagle set up their cornucopia of produce -- much of it fresh from Amish farms in Lancaster County -- on folding tables outside the project's community center.

During winter and bad weather, they set up inside the center.

Sherman and Teagle sell their produce at prices slightly higher than cost, but children can always buy a piece of fruit for a dime, or get a bruised piece free if they have no money.